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Abstract
Developing content and deciding what to teach can be a daunting task for an instructor. Students often have problems of content overload. Some content is studied too broadly in an effort to cover as many things as possible. This creates a curriculum a mile wide but not deep. Teachers should focus on specific goals, targeting essential questions. If students are able to understand big ideas they will have a conceptual lens by which to address content. Backward design is a way of planning backward by starting at a desired result. The process is broken down into three stages:
Stage 1: Identify desired results
Stage 2: Determine acceptable evidence
Stage 3: Plan learning experiences and instruction
The process helps to discourage teachers from basing units of study on certain activities that they would like to do with the class. It also addresses issues of coverage, helping teachers to cover an appropriate amount of content because of the structure of the three stage process. The template is important in identifying big ideas. The process is intended for creating units and not lessons. Differentiation can be utilized in this approach. What should not be differentiated however is stage 1 of the process. Desired goals and understandings should be common for all students. The way that students come to these understandings can be different, and stages 2 and 3 can be effectively differentiated.
Synthesis
The usefulness of backward design is shown in this chapter. Molly writes “You are working from the big goal, not towards it, which makes you more focused on it”. This is useful as many educators are worried about having to cover too much as they follow curriculum in a textbook. The Backward design process gives teachers a framework by which they can create their own instruction and not have the big ideas of the textbook forced upon them. Kiera states that the challenge though is in identifying big ideas. This is inherently the most important aspect of the backward design process and is something that will need to be worked on throughout a professional career in order o make appropriate lesson plans. In order to make those big ideas, kaitlyn believes that speaking to teachers above and below your own grade level will help you get a clearer picture. This will allow you to better understand what knowledge students come in with and what they are expected to know by the time they leave. Backward design makes differentiation work well as well. All students need to reach the desired goal. How the students get to that goal can and should be differentiated based on certain people. Understanding the big ideas is the most important aspect of learning and it is the most important aspect of the backward design approach.
Garrett Hodgkins
This chapter explored the idea of backwards designing of unit and lesson plans. It states the importance of having specific goals in mind before designing the plan. It also stresses the importance of "essential questions" and "big ideas" in the area of study. Since often teachers are asked to teach a large subject area in a short amount of time, it is helpful if the teachers focus on the essential areas of that subject, an to infuse the idea of the more essential questions in the students minds. Along with these "big ideas" there needs to be companion questions, questions that can apply to other areas in that subject, not just the specific example used. This chapter has no only helped me look at our own Backwards Design assignment differently, but taught me the importance of it. In order to teach a class of students efficiently, a plan is needed. Not only a plan, but a plan that looks at exactly what needs to be accomplished an learned by the students, along with how to assess the students learning in a fair way that applies to all of the students different intelligences. When pressed for time in my future classroom I will work to impart the "big idea" upon my students in the most universally designed way that my teaching ability can provide.
Sean Falasca
Chapter three starts out with some of the problems we will face as teachers. As teachers, we will run into content “overload” and have to make the correct choices as to which content to thoroughly cover and what not to teach at all. I have thought about this before and my question is that how do you decide which material is important to cover and which is not? Is it decided by policy, individualized, or something else? I know there are certain standard, but even meeting all those it would take “…15,465 hours (approximately nine more years of school) would be required for students to learn them all. This was the part of the chapter that worries me as a future educator.
One thing I know will help me as a teacher is the companion clarification documents which help outline the big ideas of what needs to be taught. I am also worried about teaching a subject that I do not have much prior knowledge in, but as a responsive teacher I know I will need to target and strengthen those weaknesses.
Another part of this chapter I found helpful for future use is “unpacking” the nouns and verbs and interrogating the content to better understand the context of a standard. I am assuming there will be many times as a teacher when I don’t understand the goal of a standard and using methods like this would greatly help my cause or even working with other colleagues to figure it out.
Frank Makuch
Teachers bear the responsibility of deciding what to teach to their students, and also what not to teach to their students. To help teachers decide what should and should not be taught, standards have been developed in an effort to standardize learning across geographical areas. The results of these efforts seem to have been counterproductive however as students are now learning more superficial content to cover all areas instead of going into depth about anything. To ameliorate the problem, the authors suggest the teacher should work backwards. To do this the authors suggest focusing on the big ideas and then planning backwards until the superficial details materialize. The content does not need to be taught this way, the form is just so that teachers know where their units should be moving. In addition the chapter tells us that understanding can be shown in many different ways based on the skills of the student, but that all students should be graded by the same criteria. In my own classroom I will strive to work backwards as well. I will try to make sure students understand the big picture or concept behind what we do. To this end I think that conceptual questions will be important in math. Questions that are consistently in different forms will force the student to truly think about the problem instead of just going through a list of procedures with no clear goals in mind. Also, students will not be penalized too much for smaller computational errors.
Kaitlyn Bowie
The focus of this chapter is confronting the issue faced by all educators, at every level: fitting everything in the curriculum into a sing
le school year. The best basis that a teacher can use in deciding what to teach is the state education requirements, and looking at what the students need to know when the either ascend into the next grade or graduate. The chapter does warn against falling into of the “sins” of teaching, which occur when a teacher turns everything into a fun filled activity, but the lesson is lost, or simply uses a textbook as a bible and never dares to deviate. Using the strategy of backward design allows a teacher to look at both long-term and short-term goals for their classroom, while still maintaining the creative and flexible atmosphere.
The school year never seemed long enough when I was the student, and it always seemed like teachers were scrambling and managing to let us get behind. As a teacher who will be running their own classroom, this fact that is constantly eating at the back of my mind when I work with students. Ideally I would like to work side-by-side with the teacher with grades above and below me, so that I can better understand what kind of knowledge the kids are coming in with and what they should be leaving with. By doing this I feel I can better determine the group’s knowledge level as a whole, and not have co-workers complain to me that the group they just received doesn’t know anything about grammar or can’t write a decent essay.
Tori Penney
Chapter 3 focused a lot on lessons designed backward. While the book previously had mentioned it, this was the first time I could finally get a hold on what it was and understand how to use it. It seems to be a great idea, starting with what you wish to convey to the students, figuring out how you wi
ll determine if they have in fact picked up on it, and then planning the lessons/unit. I believe that this is a good way to plan ahead, especially for one’s first year as a teacher, since there are so many standards and concepts to cover and other obstacles to jump through, as well as a good idea for returning teachers to consider while modifying their lessons. Although I do not agree with the term “sins” for problems with activities and coverage, I do agree that they exist and in the way described in the chapter. It seems to me that backwards planning would in fact help avoid these problems. While I don’t have to worry so much about the “activity sin,” where teachers focus to much on applying the knowledge to the activity and not the activity to the knowledge, I do have to worry about the “coverage sin,” especially being a social [[#|studies]] teacher. There is always so much to teach and not as much time to teach it. Especially if I do become an AP teacher, since the school year is about a month shorter than standard history classrooms.
Kiera Timme
In Chapter 3, of Integrating Differentiated Instruction& Understanding by Design, the authors C. Tomlinson and J. McTighe discuss the role of goal oriented curriculum design within the Understanding by Design (UbD) model. As stated in the text, many teachers are all too often faced with the issue of “content overload” (Tomlinson & McTighe, p24). In such cases, teachers often find themselves needing to cover more material than time would allow for. This is where goal oriented curriculum design comes into [[#|play]]. By shifting the focus away from the specific details of each content component, and attending to the “big ideas” behind these content areas, the desired learning outcomes are at the forefront of the rest of the planning. Once the big ideas have been established the teacher is then able to establish the "essential questions," and create clearly focused instructional approaches and assessment criteria.
The concept of focusing on the big ideas as a way to plan curriculum seem almost obvious after you read the chapter, yet I know this isn’t something I would have come to on my own. For me the challenge is definitely in identifying these big ideas. Thankfully the chapter provided great information on ways to go about doing this, as well as resources of where to get help. If I am going to become the kind of teacher I hope to be, it is vital that I am able to navigate my way through the state standards, and hone in on the important skills and understanding that lie within.
Jon Delorme
When building curriculum, teachers and administrators must consider essential questions that give clarity and direction to important content areas. Essential questions are basically big ideas that “provide a conceptual lens through which the specific content in the standards may be addressed (27).” To do this the book suggests planning backwards so that students may realize the desired essential questions. This seems to make sense to me and I understand why prof
essionals are emphasizing this way to plan. Our [[#|class]] is now starting to get into backwards planning. At the moment it does not make too much sense to me but I know it will be the method I use to plan how my classroom is run.
I am glad that the book included a “Frequently Asked Questions” section into this chapter because I had the same question as the first one offered, and that was “How do we identify the big ideas that we want students to understand (32)?” How does one choose those “big idea” questions that are so important to a teachers’ plan? Relying on colleagues and considering state, national, and provincial standards are good platforms to start out with according to McTighe and Tomlinson. I know I will be having much more practice in Practicum and Student Teaching with developing essential questions, but at the moment it is somewhat of an overwhelming concept. If backwards planning is so important I certainly do not want to formulate an essential question that is not very good.
Tess Perry
By understanding standards the educator can concentrate on the ‘big ideas’ and develop essential questions that will determine the unit goals. The idea of planning through backward design means having a clear picture of what the students will know and understand and how they will demonstrate their knowledge and skills before any other planning. This chapter provided a planning template to help organize the development of units. The chapter ended by discussing how differentiation instruction fit into the backward design planning model. Using backward design and differentiation suggests finding a balance between meeting standards and allowing students of varying abilities to demonstrate understanding of big ideas in a variety of different assessments. As I am about to be a new teacher showing evidence that my students learned and are able to show understanding will be extremely important. I will want to feel confident that my unit and lesson plans are effective and I will want to be able to show my colleagues and principal that I am a competent teacher. As I prepare for teaching I will be studying the standards in my concentration. Having the skills to determine essential questions regarding standards will enable me to prepare lessons so students learn and are able to draw from the big idea. This chapter has introduced to me what I should examine first when beginning planning, create the end goals first and work backwards from that point. Throughout this process I will have to keep in mind that I will have a variety of students, who will all demonstrate competency of the standards in different ways. This will force me to use differentiation to ensure students gain the skills and knowledge expected of them.
Caroline Murphy
Having only learned a basic overview of backward design in Chapter 9, reading a whole chapter about it was very informative. I learned a lot about the very intricate specifics that go into planning a lesson, and I think backward design is something that would be very useful in my future classroom, because it puts the focus on what the student needs to learn instead of what the teacher wants to get accomplished. Hearing about the problems that teachers encounter when they are trying to cover all of the required content was a little daunting. I know that as a student, I have a tendency to get too in depth with a certain topic and miss out on other important topics because my mind is so focused on what interests me. Now that I know that I will likely have trouble fitting everything I need to teach into the curriculum as it is, I will have to be aware of my tendency to skip some things in favor of others and adjust my curriculum planning accordingly. I liked the part of the chapter where the author said that backward design allows for different methods of assessment to be used to measure the same results. This takes into account the varied learning styles of students and prevents students from doing poorly on assessments just because they are not particularly strong in a certain intelligence. This is something I definitely want to bring into my classroom someday; I want my students to be assessed fairly, and I want to find ways to measure success that are based on a student’s strengths, not their weaknesses.
Molly Olsen
One of the largest issues facing educators today is finding time in the curriculum to teach all of the content that is available to them, or considered to be necessary. The best a teacher can do is follow the curriculum standards set by their state or school and try to find the "big ideas" behind them. Once you've found these you can break down the standards into more digestible parts, which will start you off on the right foot for backward planning.
Once you have the ideas you want to hit you, or identify desired results, you then determine what is acceptable evidence that these students have accomplished what you've asked of them? How do you know that they "get" it? The final stage is planning learning experiences and instruction. So basically, what are you going to do to make sure that your students can do what you need them to in order to show that they understand the curriculum and are meeting standards.
Backward design has a few good qualities to it. One being that you are working from the big goal, not towards it, which makes you more focused on it. The second being that you can avoid the "twin sins", which are using activity-oriented instruction that lacks real evidence of learning, and the second sin is leaning on the textbook too much when really it's not the textbook that you're going to have to answer to in the end, and if you don't hit your content points, the textbook is not to blame. A teacher is also responsible for distinguishing between "knowing" and "identifying", and "applying", "analyzing" or "explaining". The first two could be evaluated through multiple-choice answers, but the second would need a deeper understanding that could be for example, written about in depth.
Alison Hutchins
The third chapter of Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Designdiscussed content, and specifically the way that guiding standards in content can overload both teacher and student. Though the standards are "intended to focus teaching and learning, guide curriculum development, and provide a basis for accountability systems" (p. 24) they are still too many, according to the book, we would have to add about nine more years of school in order to teach each benchmark for only thirty minutes each. The textbooks, and the extent of information in them, progress the problem.
This is where the backward design method would be useful, as teaching this much information tends to lead educators to push information in order to meet standards, and not focus on actual student understanding. The proposal is that teachers start with an explanation of the big ideas, and work back, deciding on acceptable evidence and integrating learning experiences. Knowing this method and how to facilitate actual content understanding in the classroom is really important, as there is nothing more frustrating to a student than just having information thrown at them. Exploration and creative learning is so important in the classroom, as it not only helps students really learn, but it keeps them interested in a way that lecturing, or textbook teaching at them absolutely does not. This chapter made me think about how to tackle those standards that I will be facing in a new and pretty exciting way, as backward design is a much more inventive and creative method than some of the alternatives.
Amy Jones
In chapter 3 the authors talk about how stressful it can be to manage the amount of material that you want to cover in a class and the amount of time in which you have to teach it. To try and help with this issue subject content standards were introduced. For many teachers this helped guided their curriculums but it also put more pressure for teachers to get through this certain material. The chapter continues with giving you an example of a “three-stage backwards design process for curriculum planning”(27).
Stage 1- Identify desired results-(clarity about priorities)
Stage 2-Determine acceptable evidence (assessments regarding the targeted learning)
Stage 3- Plan learning experiences and instruction (engaging and effective for learners)
This chapter also offers a template for organizing a backward design which seems very interactive, I also found the WHERETO acronym for organizing a learning plan very efficient and easy to remember.
W- Where the unit is going and What is expected
H-Hook the students and Hold their interest
E- Equip students, help them Experience key ideas and Explore the issue
R- Provide opportunities to Rethink and Revise their understanding
E-Evaluate students work
T- Tailor to needs of all the students
O- Be Organized
The chapter also helps in the understanding of the standards at which you are trying to meet. The helpful hint that the authors proposed was to analyze the standards and for the different nouns that were used look at those as the “big ideas” and the verbs are simply the assessments that are suggested.
Table of Contents
Abstract
Developing content and deciding what to teach can be a daunting task for an instructor. Students often have problems of content overload. Some content is studied too broadly in an effort to cover as many things as possible. This creates a curriculum a mile wide but not deep. Teachers should focus on specific goals, targeting essential questions. If students are able to understand big ideas they will have a conceptual lens by which to address content. Backward design is a way of planning backward by starting at a desired result. The process is broken down into three stages:Stage 1: Identify desired results
Stage 2: Determine acceptable evidence
Stage 3: Plan learning experiences and instruction
The process helps to discourage teachers from basing units of study on certain activities that they would like to do with the class. It also addresses issues of coverage, helping teachers to cover an appropriate amount of content because of the structure of the three stage process. The template is important in identifying big ideas. The process is intended for creating units and not lessons. Differentiation can be utilized in this approach. What should not be differentiated however is stage 1 of the process. Desired goals and understandings should be common for all students. The way that students come to these understandings can be different, and stages 2 and 3 can be effectively differentiated.
Synthesis
The usefulness of backward design is shown in this chapter. Molly writes “You are working from the big goal, not towards it, which makes you more focused on it”. This is useful as many educators are worried about having to cover too much as they follow curriculum in a textbook. The Backward design process gives teachers a framework by which they can create their own instruction and not have the big ideas of the textbook forced upon them. Kiera states that the challenge though is in identifying big ideas. This is inherently the most important aspect of the backward design process and is something that will need to be worked on throughout a professional career in order o make appropriate lesson plans. In order to make those big ideas, kaitlyn believes that speaking to teachers above and below your own grade level will help you get a clearer picture. This will allow you to better understand what knowledge students come in with and what they are expected to know by the time they leave. Backward design makes differentiation work well as well. All students need to reach the desired goal. How the students get to that goal can and should be differentiated based on certain people. Understanding the big ideas is the most important aspect of learning and it is the most important aspect of the backward design approach.Garrett Hodgkins
This chapter explored the idea of backwards designing of unit and lesson plans. It states the importance of having specific goals in mind before designing the plan. It also stresses the importance of "essential questions" and "big ideas" in the area of study. Since often teachers are asked to teach a large subject area in a short amount of time, it is helpful if the teachers focus on the essential areas of that subject, an to infuse the idea of the more essential questions in the students minds. Along with these "big ideas" there needs to be companion questions, questions that can apply to other areas in that subject, not just the specific example used.This chapter has no only helped me look at our own Backwards Design assignment differently, but taught me the importance of it. In order to teach a class of students efficiently, a plan is needed. Not only a plan, but a plan that looks at exactly what needs to be accomplished an learned by the students, along with how to assess the students learning in a fair way that applies to all of the students different intelligences. When pressed for time in my future classroom I will work to impart the "big idea" upon my students in the most universally designed way that my teaching ability can provide.
Sean Falasca
Chapter three starts out with some of the problems we will face as teachers. As teachers, we will run into content “overload” and have to make the correct choices as to which content to thoroughly cover and what not to teach at all. I have thought about this before and my question is that how do you decide which material is important to cover and which is not? Is it decided by policy, individualized, or something else? I know there are certain standard, but even meeting all those it would take “…15,465 hours (approximately nine more years of school) would be required for students to learn them all. This was the part of the chapter that worries me as a future educator.
One thing I know will help me as a teacher is the companion clarification documents which help outline the big ideas of what needs to be taught. I am also worried about teaching a subject that I do not have much prior knowledge in, but as a responsive teacher I know I will need to target and strengthen those weaknesses.
Another part of this chapter I found helpful for future use is “unpacking” the nouns and verbs and interrogating the content to better understand the context of a standard. I am assuming there will be many times as a teacher when I don’t understand the goal of a standard and using methods like this would greatly help my cause or even working with other colleagues to figure it out.
Frank Makuch
Teachers bear the responsibility of deciding what to teach to their students, and also what not to teach to their students. To help teachers decide what should and should not be taught, standards have been developed in an effort to standardize learning across geographical areas. The results of these efforts seem to have been counterproductive however as students are now learning more superficial content to cover all areas instead of going into depth about anything. To ameliorate the problem, the authors suggest the teacher should work backwards. To do this the authors suggest focusing on the big ideas and then planning backwards until the superficial details materialize. The content does not need to be taught this way, the form is just so that teachers know where their units should be moving. In addition the chapter tells us that understanding can be shown in many different ways based on the skills of the student, but that all students should be graded by the same criteria. In my own classroom I will strive to work backwards as well. I will try to make sure students understand the big picture or concept behind what we do. To this end I think that conceptual questions will be important in math. Questions that are consistently in different forms will force the student to truly think about the problem instead of just going through a list of procedures with no clear goals in mind. Also, students will not be penalized too much for smaller computational errors.Kaitlyn Bowie
The focus of this chapter is confronting the issue faced by all educators, at every level: fitting everything in the curriculum into a single school year. The best basis that a teacher can use in deciding what to teach is the state education requirements, and looking at what the students need to know when the either ascend into the next grade or graduate. The chapter does warn against falling into of the “sins” of teaching, which occur when a teacher turns everything into a fun filled activity, but the lesson is lost, or simply uses a textbook as a bible and never dares to deviate. Using the strategy of backward design allows a teacher to look at both long-term and short-term goals for their classroom, while still maintaining the creative and flexible atmosphere.
The school year never seemed long enough when I was the student, and it always seemed like teachers were scrambling and managing to let us get behind. As a teacher who will be running their own classroom, this fact that is constantly eating at the back of my mind when I work with students. Ideally I would like to work side-by-side with the teacher with grades above and below me, so that I can better understand what kind of knowledge the kids are coming in with and what they should be leaving with. By doing this I feel I can better determine the group’s knowledge level as a whole, and not have co-workers complain to me that the group they just received doesn’t know anything about grammar or can’t write a decent essay.
Tori Penney
Chapter 3 focused a lot on lessons designed backward. While the book previously had mentioned it, this was the first time I could finally get a hold on what it was and understand how to use it. It seems to be a great idea, starting with what you wish to convey to the students, figuring out how you will determine if they have in fact picked up on it, and then planning the lessons/unit. I believe that this is a good way to plan ahead, especially for one’s first year as a teacher, since there are so many standards and concepts to cover and other obstacles to jump through, as well as a good idea for returning teachers to consider while modifying their lessons. Although I do not agree with the term “sins” for problems with activities and coverage, I do agree that they exist and in the way described in the chapter. It seems to me that backwards planning would in fact help avoid these problems. While I don’t have to worry so much about the “activity sin,” where teachers focus to much on applying the knowledge to the activity and not the activity to the knowledge, I do have to worry about the “coverage sin,” especially being a social [[#|studies]] teacher. There is always so much to teach and not as much time to teach it. Especially if I do become an AP teacher, since the school year is about a month shorter than standard history classrooms.
Kiera Timme
In Chapter 3, of Integrating Differentiated Instruction& Understanding by Design, the authors C. Tomlinson and J. McTighe discuss the role of goal oriented curriculum design within the Understanding by Design (UbD) model. As stated in the text, many teachers are all too often faced with the issue of “content overload” (Tomlinson & McTighe, p24). In such cases, teachers often find themselves needing to cover more material than time would allow for. This is where goal oriented curriculum design comes into [[#|play]]. By shifting the focus away from the specific details of each content component, and attending to the “big ideas” behind these content areas, the desired learning outcomesare at the forefront of the rest of the planning. Once the big ideas have been established the teacher is then able to establish the "essential questions," and create clearly focused instructional approaches and assessment criteria.
The concept of focusing on the big ideas as a way to plan curriculum seem almost obvious after you read the chapter, yet I know this isn’t something I would have come to on my own. For me the challenge is definitely in identifying these big ideas. Thankfully the chapter provided great information on ways to go about doing this, as well as resources of where to get help. If I am going to become the kind of teacher I hope to be, it is vital that I am able to navigate my way through the state standards, and hone in on the important skills and understanding that lie within.
Jon Delorme
When building curriculum, teachers and administrators must consider essential questions that give clarity and direction to important content areas. Essential questions are basically big ideas that “provide a conceptual lens through which the specific content in the standards may be addressed (27).” To do this the book suggests planning backwards so that students may realize the desired essential questions. This seems to make sense to me and I understand why prof
essionals are emphasizing this way to plan. Our [[#|class]] is now starting to get into backwards planning. At the moment it does not make too much sense to me but I know it will be the method I use to plan how my classroom is run.
I am glad that the book included a “Frequently Asked Questions” section into this chapter because I had the same question as the first one offered, and that was “How do we identify the big ideas that we want students to understand (32)?” How does one choose those “big idea” questions that are so important to a teachers’ plan? Relying on colleagues and considering state, national, and provincial standards are good platforms to start out with according to McTighe and Tomlinson. I know I will be having much more practice in Practicum and Student Teaching with developing essential questions, but at the moment it is somewhat of an overwhelming concept. If backwards planning is so important I certainly do not want to formulate an essential question that is not very good.
Tess Perry
By understanding standards the educator can concentrate on the ‘big ideas’ and develop essential questions that will determine the unit goals. The idea of planning through backward design means having a clear picture of what the students will know and understand and how they will demonstrate their knowledge and skills before any other planning. This chapter provided a planning template to help organize the development of units. The chapter ended by discussing how differentiation instruction fit into the backward design planning model. Using backward design and differentiation suggests finding a balance between meeting standards and allowing students of varying abilities to demonstrate understanding of big ideas in a variety of different assessments.
As I am about to be a new teacher showing evidence that my students learned and are able to show understanding will be extremely important. I will want to feel confident that my unit and lesson plans are effective and I will want to be able to show my colleagues and principal that I am a competent teacher. As I prepare for teaching I will be studying the standards in my concentration. Having the skills to determine essential questions regarding standards will enable me to prepare lessons so students learn and are able to draw from the big idea. This chapter has introduced to me what I should examine first when beginning planning, create the end goals first and work backwards from that point. Throughout this process I will have to keep in mind that I will have a variety of students, who will all demonstrate competency of the standards in different ways. This will force me to use differentiation to ensure students gain the skills and knowledge expected of them.
Caroline Murphy
Having only learned a basic overview of backward design in Chapter 9, reading a whole chapter about it was very informative. I learned a lot about the very intricate specifics that go into planning a lesson, and I think backward design is something that would be very useful in my future classroom, because it puts the focus on what the student needs to learn instead of what the teacher wants to get accomplished. Hearing about the problems that teachers encounter when they are trying to cover all of the required content was a little daunting. I know that as a student, I have a tendency to get too in depth with a certain topic and miss out on other important topics because my mind is so focused on what interests me. Now that I know that I will likely have trouble fitting everything I need to teach into the curriculum as it is, I will have to be aware of my tendency to skip some things in favor of others and adjust my curriculum planning accordingly. I liked the part of the chapter where the author said that backward design allows for different methods of assessment to be used to measure the same results. This takes into account the varied learning styles of students and prevents students from doing poorly on assessments just because they are not particularly strong in a certain intelligence. This is something I definitely want to bring into my classroom someday; I want my students to be assessed fairly, and I want to find ways to measure success that are based on a student’s strengths, not their weaknesses.
Molly Olsen
One of the largest issues facing educators today is finding time in the curriculum to teach all of the content that is available to them, or considered to be necessary. The best a teacher can do is follow the curriculum standards set by their state or school and try to find the "big ideas" behind them. Once you've found these you can break down the standards into more digestible parts, which will start you off on the right foot for backward planning.Once you have the ideas you want to hit you, or identify desired results, you then determine what is acceptable evidence that these students have accomplished what you've asked of them? How do you know that they "get" it? The final stage is planning learning experiences and instruction. So basically, what are you going to do to make sure that your students can do what you need them to in order to show that they understand the curriculum and are meeting standards.
Backward design has a few good qualities to it. One being that you are working from the big goal, not towards it, which makes you more focused on it. The second being that you can avoid the "twin sins", which are using activity-oriented instruction that lacks real evidence of learning, and the second sin is leaning on the textbook too much when really it's not the textbook that you're going to have to answer to in the end, and if you don't hit your content points, the textbook is not to blame. A teacher is also responsible for distinguishing between "knowing" and "identifying", and "applying", "analyzing" or "explaining". The first two could be evaluated through multiple-choice answers, but the second would need a deeper understanding that could be for example, written about in depth.
Alison Hutchins
The third chapter of Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Designdiscussed content, and specifically the way that guiding standards in content can overload both teacher and student. Though the standards are "intended to focus teaching and learning, guide curriculum development, and provide a basis for accountability systems" (p. 24) they are still too many, according to the book, we would have to add about nine more years of school in order to teach each benchmark for only thirty minutes each. The textbooks, and the extent of information in them, progress the problem.
This is where the backward design method would be useful, as teaching this much information tends to lead educators to push information in order to meet standards, and not focus on actual student understanding. The proposal is that teachers start with an explanation of the big ideas, and work back, deciding on acceptable evidence and integrating learning experiences. Knowing this method and how to facilitate actual content understanding in the classroom is really important, as there is nothing more frustrating to a student than just having information thrown at them. Exploration and creative learning is so important in the classroom, as it not only helps students really learn, but it keeps them interested in a way that lecturing, or textbook teaching at them absolutely does not. This chapter made me think about how to tackle those standards that I will be facing in a new and pretty exciting way, as backward design is a much more inventive and creative method than some of the alternatives.
Amy Jones
In chapter 3 the authors talk about how stressful it can be to manage the amount of material that you want to cover in a class and the amount of time in which you have to teach it. To try and help with this issue subject content standards were introduced. For many teachers this helped guided their curriculums but it also put more pressure for teachers to get through this certain material. The chapter continues with giving you an example of a “three-stage backwards design process for curriculum planning”(27).Stage 1- Identify desired results-(clarity about priorities)
Stage 2-Determine acceptable evidence (assessments regarding the targeted learning)
Stage 3- Plan learning experiences and instruction (engaging and effective for learners)
This chapter also offers a template for organizing a backward design which seems very interactive, I also found the WHERETO acronym for organizing a learning plan very efficient and easy to remember.
W- Where the unit is going and What is expected
H-Hook the students and Hold their interest
E- Equip students, help them Experience key ideas and Explore the issue
R- Provide opportunities to Rethink and Revise their understanding
E-Evaluate students work
T- Tailor to needs of all the students
O- Be Organized
The chapter also helps in the understanding of the standards at which you are trying to meet. The helpful hint that the authors proposed was to analyze the standards and for the different nouns that were used look at those as the “big ideas” and the verbs are simply the assessments that are suggested.